NNPN's 90th Rolling World Premiere MY LORD, WHAT A NIGHT

National New Play Network, the country's alliance of nonprofit theaters that collaborate in innovative ways to develop, produce, and extend the life of new plays, announces its 90th Rolling World Premiere (RWP): My Lord, What a Night by Deborah Brevoort. The Roll will begin in Shepherdstown, WV at the Contemporary American Theater Festival (July 5-28, 2019). The show will then head to Florida where it will be produced by Orlando Shakes (March 18 - April 26, 2020) and wrap up with one more production to be announced later.

An NNPN Rolling World Premiere (RWP) models a process for developing and producing new plays that results in stronger work overall and the momentum needed for a play to join the repertoire of frequently produced new American works. Each Rolling World Premiere connects three or more NNPN Member Theaters that choose to mount the same new play within a 12-month period, allowing the playwright to develop the work with a new creative team in each theater's community. To date, NNPN has championed RWPs with over one million dollars in financial support. Alumni plays have received hundreds of subsequent productions, recognition in markets across the world, been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won Steinberg/ATCA, Stavis, PEN and Blackburn awards, and been adapted into feature films.

In 1937, legendary singer Marian Anderson gave a concert in Princeton, NJ and was refused a room at the Nassau Inn because she was black.?Albert Einstein invited her to stay at his home beginning an intimate friendship between the two that would last a lifetime.??Two years later, Anderson was denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington DC, which led to her historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the beginning of the civil rights movement. ?Inspired by actual events,?My Lord, What a Night? explores the struggles faced by?two icons of the 20th?century who dealt with the injustices of Jim Crow and the rise of anti-Semitism during a highly divided era in American history.?

Deborah Brevoort is the award-winning author of numerous plays, musicals and operas. She is best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie, which is produced all over the world. Other plays include: The Poetry of Pizza, The Blue-Sky Boys, The Comfort Team, The Velvet Weapon, Into the Fire, Signs of Life and Blue Moon Over Memphis, a Noh Drama about Elvis, which have been produced at such theatres as Purple Rose, Barter Theatre, Virginia Stage, Capital Rep, The New Group, Women's Project and others. A two-time winner of the Frederick Lowe Award for King Island Christmas with composer David Friedman and Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing with Scott Richards, she also wrote the book and lyrics for Crossing Over, an Amish hip hop musical with Stephanie Salzman (co-lyricist). She is currently writing Loving, a musical about the Loving vs. Virginia story with composer Diedre Murray and Tiffany Girls, a musical about Clara Driscoll, the uncredited creator of the famed Tiffany Lamp, with composer Julianne Wick Davis. She is a three-time winner of the Frontiers Competition at Ft. Worth Opera for Embedded and Albert Nobbs (with Patrick Soluri), and Steal a Pencil for Me, with Gerald Cohen. Her latest opera, Murasaki's Moon, with composer Michi Wiancko, premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and On-site Opera in NYC in 2019. Her plays are published by Applause Books, Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service and No Passport Press. She teaches at Columbia University and NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. She serves as a mentor to the NBO Musical Theatre workshop in Nairobi, Kenya.

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